1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to access of data in general, and, in more particular, a method and system for accessing data using voice commands via a voice communications connection to a remote database access system.
2. Background Information
Today""s work environment is more mobile than ever before. The proliferation of cellular telephony, wireless Internet-enables devices, laptop computers, handheld PCs and various other technologies have helped create a traveling xe2x80x9cvirtual officexe2x80x9d work environment for many. Many professionals spend endless hours on the road, in airports, at business meetings, etc. Prior to the existence of the foregoing devices, the traveling professional might have to bring paper copies of his or her work with them if he or she needed access to such information while away from the office. Today, such information can be easily accessed via a laptop computer or handheld computer.
Although these modern devices are wonderful, there are often situations when a business professional is away from the office, and needs to obtain data that is difficult, if not impossible, to access using current technology. For example, much of today""s business data is stored in central repositories, such as enterprise databases. While accessing enterprise data is relatively painless via a land-line network link, the problem gets more difficult when a land-line network link is not available, such as is often the case for the mobile professional.
On first glance, a wireless network link might appear to be a viable option; however, current wireless network access is generally very slow and unpredictable. For instance, wireless Internet access of full-featured Internet sites typically provides data transfer rates of only 20 kbits/sec. Why not access the data via an Internet-enabled phone? While many wireless phone and PDA manufacturers tout their devices"" ability to access the Internet, what they don""t advertise is that these devices can access only a very limited subset of Internet sites, including virtual private network hosts, that support the WAP (Wireless application protocol) protocol transport and include special versions of some of their web pages and data coded in WML (wireless markup language) rather than the HTML (hypertext markup language) code used for conventional web data.
It would be advantageous to enable the mobile professional to access data from virtually any location, such as via a wireless phone. This type of data access is presently provided by many banking institutions and credit-card agencies, whereby customers are able to access their personal banking and credit-card information by navigating through sets of fixed menu options by providing xe2x80x9cvoicexe2x80x9d commands in response to predetermined system prompts. However, this type of voice access to data is very limited, as it only allows access to a very limited set of institution-generated data, and the mechanism for accessing the data is very static. For instance, under most voice-enabled bank data access systems, an individual may only access their own account data through a predetermined fixed navigation path. Ideally, it would be advantageous to enable users to access a wide variety of different data types from a telephone, whereby the user could perform ad hoc queries and access user- or company-specific information that has been stored in a database by the user or others known to the user rather than an institution that maintains the database.
The present invention provides a system and method for providing access to customer relationship management (CRM) data via a voice interface. In one embodiment, the system includes a voice recognition unit and a speech processing server that work together to enable users to interact with the system via a telephone using voice commands guided by navigation context sensitive voice prompts, and provides user-requested data in a verbalized format back to the users.
The speech processing server receives digitized voice waveform data and processes it to determine the voice commands of the user. The system also uses a xe2x80x9cgrammarxe2x80x9d that enables users to query for various data using intuitive natural language voice commands. In response to a user command, the system processes the command to determine what data the user wants to retrieve, or where the user wants to navigate. If the user desires to access data from the database, an appropriate query is generated by the system to retrieve one or more data sets corresponding to a verbal data request input provided by the user. The user is then enabled to xe2x80x9cbrowsexe2x80x9d the various data that are returned through voice command navigation, wherein the system xe2x80x9creadsxe2x80x9d the data back to the user using text-to-speech (TTS) technology.
In accordance with various aspects of the invention, details of an exemplary voice access data system are provided that enables users to remotely access data stored in a CRM database via a telephone. In a typical voice access session, a user will call a phone number that provides access to the system and perform a log in operation during which a user is authenticated through use of a user identifier and a PIN number. After the user has been authenticated, a main menu enables a user to navigate to various domains, wherein each domain provides user interface options pertaining to a corresponding logical partition of business data. For example, in an exemplary CRM data system, the domains include an opportunities, contacts, accounts, calendar, and employees domain. In accordance with the teaching and principles of the invention, other domains may be added or substituted to correspond to various types of data commonly found in enterprise data systems. The user can xe2x80x9cbrowsexe2x80x9d each domain by speaking appropriate voice commands, which are context sensitive to the current location of the user in the domain. Furthermore, depending on the navigation context, a user may xe2x80x9cjumpxe2x80x9d to another domain so as to enable the user to retrieve data from that domain. Users may also interactively initiate a phone call to selected contacts, accounts, and/or employees through the system while participating in a user session.